Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I had to visit the bank today.  Since I was on my way to the park (with Maxim), I decided to take him in.  While we were standing in the queue, one of the clerks stopped by to say hi.  She played a bit with Maxim and suggested that we open an account for him.  I thought she was kidding, so I replied in a Fargo-ish way “Oh, yeah.  Right”. Surprisingly, she looked at me very seriously and said that she wasn’t joking one bit.

Needless to say I got interested.  She said that all I had to do was to bring Maxim’s birth certificate, and based on this document she can open a bank account on his name.  Maxim will only be able to use this account when he is 18.  But until than, both I and Olga can transfer small amounts of money to that account - 10 or 20 pounds a month.

As a result, if we’d do that, Maxim will have a good sum of money to start the adult life.  (Calculations for the lazy ones: 10 pounds per month x 12 month per year = 120 pounds per year.  Maxim is now 1 year old.  That means that he has another 17 years to go before he can use the account.  120 pounds per year x 17 years = 2040 pounds + bank percentage.  4080 + percentage you’re willing to make it 20 pounds per month).

I understand that for many parents saying this outloud is like repeating that the planet Earth is round, but for me it was a completely new unconsidered idea.  I’ll be rushing back to the bank with Maxim’s birth certificates one of these days.

This is my response to this post in Sanjay’s blog. I originally wrote this as a comment, but before I pressed “Submit” button, I thought that it would be better to have it here, with all the crosslinks.

Sanjay noticed that pictures like the one of Maxim on his birthday are a cool new way of saving height measurements. That is instead of using old ways of pen, rule, and wall. He regrets only that there is no date and time information on the picture.

Well, that’s not a problem at all, my dear friend! Most of the modern digital cameras save a lot of meta information in the image file. With right tools that information is trivial to extract (Google search for “EXIF”).

I put a bit more thought into the idea and realized that it can actually be much more fun. With data and time of the image available from the image file itself, we are missing only one bit for a complete picture - the age of a child. Since there is no automatic way of getting it, a human interaction is necessary.

And where there is human interaction, there is social interaction. Flickr comes to mind. Consider this for a moment:

Parents make pictures of their kids against a height meter. Then, they upload these images to Flickr. Then, they tag these images with three tags. One tag for the age of the child, say “age14month” or “age2years”. One tag for the height itself, say “76cm” or “132cm”. And one additional tag to make these pictures easy to find, say “kidsgrow”. Maybe an image pool or user group would be a better way of goind about it.

With setup like this, there is a central location, where all such images are stored (backup). People can then easily find all pictures of their own kids, as well as other kids of the same age or the same height.

There are also a whole bunch of third-party applications that can utilize data from Flickr, like, for example, fd’s Flickr Toys.

How do you like the sound of that?

Smart people say:

The devil is in the details

Why or why don’t I listen to them more often?

This video is off a smart guy talking to MIT crowd about globalization. The speech is titled after the book he wrote - “The World Is Flat“. This is the most interesting speech on the subject of globalization that I’ve ever heard. It’s very widely scoped too - it touches on everything from Berlin wall and Netscape browser to 9/11 and open source. I’ll be ordering the book shortly too.

The speech is in Real Media format and is about one hour long, so you might want to install Real Player and find a large piece of time, if you plan on watching it.

After I saw it, I was somewhat tired. The speech is very thought provoking and it made my brains work hard. Packing it all into my head felt like dealing with a wardrobe of clothes and a tiny bag. Things were falling out of it all the time and I couldn’t manage the zipper to close.

Rarely I feel like this.

Somehow I came to realize that cubicles and dress code contradict. I can’t exactly prove this point. Yet. But this thought in my head makes all the sense there is.

Dress code is needed where people have proper offices. If you have an office, please, do weare a shirt and, possibly, a tie. But if the company is too cheap to give you your personal space, demanding proper clothing from you is, well, too much.

Of course, this can be argued backward - if you are hidden in the office why on Earth would you need to wear a tie? That’s why I said that I can’t prove it. Yet.